MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ripped his colleagues in the mainstream media for downplaying Donald Trump's negative characteristics.
The former president won the Republican nomination despite attempting to undo his 2020 election loss, for which he's been indicted in federal and state courts, and he's been criminally charged in two other cases – one of which resulted in his conviction on 34 felony counts – and the "Morning Joe" host said that many fellow journalists and pundits have normalized those facts and, as panelist Mike Barnicle put it, his "deranged" statements.
"The shocking statements come every day, and not surprising but still shocking what he says, and, you know, even Arlington [National Cemetery], it's seen major newspaper outlets talk about how will this impact Kamala Harris and the issue of Afghanistan after he goes and just acts like a brute and, you know, desecrates Arlington," Scarborough said. "We see it time and time again. For some reason the mainstream media, nine years into Donald Trump's era in American politics, still doesn't know how to cover Donald Trump. They still are engaging even at this late hour in moral relativism."
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"They just don't know how to put it in proper perspective because, as I said yesterday, they are so concerned about being objective that they're treating this race like it was 1996, Clinton vs. Dole, or 2004 Bush vs. Kerry. Their objective, and I put that word in quotes, their objectivity is actually not objective at all. It ends up playing to Donald Trump's advantage every day because they are so numbed by the hate, the hate speech that is spewed out of his mouth for the past nine years."
Scarborough singled out CNBC's "Squawk Box" host Joe Kernen, although he didn't identify him by name, for directing an anti-Trump Republican away from his concerns about the Jan. 6 insurrection to economic concerns, which he said missed the point of the former president's threat to the nation
"A former republican senator, a former conservative republican senator [Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania] said on the air that he could not vote for Donald Trump because he's an insurrectionist, and the person interviewing him said, you should be worried about other things like tax policy and regulations," Scarborough said. "I mean, how do you put an insurrection against the United States government up against changes in the tax code?"
"I don't understand the short sightedness," said co-host Mika Brzezinski. "You have to have a country in order to have tax policy."
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